July 2012

It's Kirriemuir Show on Saturday (14th July) and we're taking Breeze and George. We've never shown cattle before but we like to promote the Shetland breed, so we thought we'd give them a wee outing. Kirrie is quite a small show but it has classes for "Other Native Breeds", which is nice.

Our classes are judged after the Highlands and by the same judge. Breeze is entered in the "Heifer born after 1 January 2010" and George is in the "Calf born after 1st January 2012". Unfortunately, there wasn't a class for the cutest calf .

Rosemary had a very significant birthday on Sunday (don't ask, look at the cake!) so I needed to find a special cake for the occasion. Fortunately Google directed me to Doreen at Strathview Designs, just a few miles up the road.

I spoke with her on the phone, sent some photos, and on Sunday collected this magnificent smallholder cake:

I can't believe it's more than a week since we were at Kirriemuir Show - but nevertheless, I thought I give a wee update.

Our main purpose in going was to publicise the Shetland cattle breed; the Shetland Cattle Breeders' Association had kindly given us a couple of publicity banners and some information leaflets. We also had a banner and leaflets publicising the Scottish Smallholder and Grower Festival, so that was a second reason for going. Thirdly, we wanted to support our local show and lastly, we love our cattle and wanted to show them off.

Although we've had sheep since 2007, we've never had purpose built sheep handling facilities. Any handling has involved Dan sheep-wrestling and sheep-restraining. To be honest, it meant he spent too much time holding sheeps' heads while I jagged, dosed, dagged and trimmed. And I can't afford his hourly rate .

So when we sold Longcarse, some sheep handling equipment was high up my wish list. After much deliberation, we've bought an economy sheep race with guillotine gate and two way / stop gate from Penderfeed. The manufacturer is IAE; we have a couple of wheeled sheep hay racks from them and have found them robust, well designed and reasonably priced.

There's a poultry sale on at Forfar this week, so I'm going along with my birthday money. We've had hens since 2002 - started with three, now have 70 plus, mostly hybrids for eggs (Warrens, Black Rocks, Rhode Rocks with a sprinkling of others).

Recently, however, Dan and I have fancied having a few pure breeds as little breeding flocks. Our Black Orpington, Ruby, went broody three months ago so we set her on some Welsummer eggs and we have six eight-week old chicks (we think we have four hens and two cockerels) - so that's our first wee flock.

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Who is the Accidental Smallholder?

Hello, I'm Rosemary Champion, aka the Accidental Smallholder. I'm a smallholder in the east of Scotland and started this website to help other people who are interested in smallholding to find their way, and to share my experiences.